First of all, the false contour effect shall be explained with a Plasma Display Panel (PDP). Generally, a PDP utilizes a matrix array of discharge cells, which could only be “ON” or “OFF”. Therefore, unlike a CRT or LCD in which gray levels are expressed by analogue control of the light emission, a PDP controls the gray level by a pulse Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) of each cell. This time-modulation will be integrated by the eye over a period corresponding to the eye time response. The more often a cell is switched on in a given time frame, the higher is its luminance (brightness). For example, when disposing of 8 bit luminance levels (256 levels per colour, so 16.7 million colours), each level can be represented by a combination of the 8 following bits:    1-2-4-8-16-32-64-128.
To realize such a coding, the frame period can be divided in 8 lighting sub-periods (called sub-fields), each corresponding to a bit and a brightness level. The number of light pulses for the bit “2” is the double as for the bit “1” etc. With these 8 sub-periods, it is possible through combination to build the 256 gray levels. The eye of an observer will integrate these subperiods over a frame period to catch the impression of the right gray level. FIG. 1 presents this decomposition.
The light emission pattern introduces new categories of image-quality degradation corresponding to disturbances of gray levels and colours. These will be defined as “dynamic false contour effect” since they correspond to disturbances of gray levels and colours in the form of an apparition of coloured edges in the picture when an observation point on the plasma panel moves. Such failures on a picture lead to the impression of strong contours appearing on homogeneous areas. The degradation is enhanced when the image has a smooth gradation (like skin) and when the light-emission period exceeds several milliseconds.
When an observation point (eye focus area) on the PDP screen moves, the eye will follow this movement. Consequently, it will no more integrate the same cell over a frame (static integration) but it will integrate information coming from different cells located on the movement trajectory and it will mix all these light pulses together, which leads to a faulty signal information.
Basically, the false contour effect occurs when there is a transition from one level to another with a totally different code. So the first point is from a code (with n sub-fields) which permits to achieve p gray levels (typically p=256), to select m gray levels (with m<p) among the 2n possible sub-fields arrangements (when working at the encoding) or among the p gray levels (when working at the video level) so that close levels will have close sub-fields arrangements.
The second point is to keep a maximum of levels, in order to keep a good video quality. For this the minimum of chosen levels should be equal to twice the number of sub-fields.
For all further examples, a 11 sub-fields mode defined as following is used:    1 2 3 5 8 12 18 27 41 58 80.
For these issues the Gravity Centre Coding (GCC) was introduced in document EP 1 256 924.
As seen previously, the human eye integrates the light emitted by Pulse Width Modulation. So if one considers all video levels encoded with a basic code, the time position of these video levels (the centre of gravity of the light) is not growing continuously with the video level as shown in FIG. 2.
The centre of gravity CG2 for a video level 2 is larger than the centre of gravity CG1 of video level 1. However, the centre of gravity CG3 of video level 3 is smaller than that of video level 2.
This introduces false contour. The centre of gravity is defined as the centre of gravity of the sub-fields ‘on’ weighted by their sustain weight:
      CG    ⁡          (      code      )        =                    ∑                  i          =          1                n            ⁢                        sfW          i                *                              δ            i                    ⁡                      (            code            )                          *                  sfCG          i                                    ∑                  i          =          1                n            ⁢                        sfW          i                *                              δ            i                    ⁡                      (            code            )                              where sfwi is the sub-field weight of ith sub-field. δi is equal to 1 if the ith sub-field is ‘on’ for the chosen code, 0 otherwise. SfCGi is the centre of gravity of the ith sub-field, i.e. its time position, as shown in FIG. 3 for the first seven sub-fields.
The temporal centres of gravity of the 256 video levels for the 11 sub-fields code chosen here can be represented as shown in FIG. 4.
The curve is not monotonous and presents a lot of jumps. These jumps correspond to false contour. According to GCC these jumps are suppressed by selecting only some levels, for which the gravity centre will grow continuously with the video levels apart from exceptions in the low video level range up to a first predefined limit and/or in the high video level range from a second predefined limit on. This can be done by tracing a monotone curve without jumps on the previous graphic, and selecting the nearest point as shown in FIG. 5. Thus, not all possible video levels are used when employing GCC.
In the low video level region it should be avoided to select only levels with growing gravity centre because the number of possible levels is low and so if only growing gravity centre levels were selected, there would not be enough levels to have a good video quality in the black levels since the human eye is very sensitive in the black levels. In addition the false contour in dark areas is negligible.
In the high level region, there is a decrease of the gravity centres, so there will be a decrease also in the chosen levels, but this is not important since the human eye is not sensitive in the high level. In these areas, the eye is not capable to distinguish different levels and the false contour level is negligible regarding the video level (the eye is only sensitive to relative amplitude if the Weber-Fechner law is considered). For these reasons, the monotony of the curve will be necessary just for the video levels between 10% and 80% of the maximal video level.
In this case, for this example, 40 levels (m=40) will be selected among the 256 possible. These 40 levels permit to keep a good video quality (gray-scale portrayal).
This selection can be made when working at the video level, since only few levels (typically 256) are available. But when this selection is made at the encoding, there are 2′ (n is the number of sub-fields) different sub-fields arrangements, and so more levels can be selected as seen on FIG. 6, where each point corresponds to a sub-fields arrangement (there are different sub-fields arrangements giving a same video level).
Furthermore, this method can be applied to different coding, like 100 Hz for example without changes, giving also good results.
On one hand, the GCC concept enables a visible reduction of the false contour effect. On the other hand, it introduces noise in the picture in the form of dithering needed since less levels are available than required. The missing levels are then rendered by means of spatial and temporal mixing of available GCC levels.
The number of levels selected for the GCC concept is a compromise between a high number of levels that is good for static areas (less dithering noise) but bad for moving areas (more false contour) and a low number of levels that is good for moving areas (less false contour effect) but bad for static areas (more dithering noise). In-between it is possible to define a larger amount of GCC coding that are located between one extreme and the other.
Document EP 1 376 521 introduces a technique based on a motion detection enabling to switch ON or OFF the GCC depending if there is a lot of motion in the picture or not.